Drumbeats

Copyright 2011 WordFire, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-45247-415-1

“Drumbeats” copyright 1994 Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart.

Originally published in
Shock Rock II
, edited by Jeff Gelb, Pocket Books, 1994.

Introduction copyright 2011 WordFire, Inc.

Afterword copyright 2006 Neil Peart. Originally published in
Landscapes
, from Five Star, 2006.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

Digital Edition

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www.wordfire.com

Electronic Version by Baen Ebooks

http://www.baen.com

INTRODUCTION

Kevin J. Anderson

For those of my fans who don’t recognize the name of the coauthor on this story (and I doubt there are very many who don’t), Neil Peart is the drummer and lyricist for the rock group Rush, writer of some of the most innovative and thought-provoking songs I have ever heard.

The music of Rush has inspired my writing since the late 1970s, when I picked copies of
2112
and
A Farewell to Kings
among my “Ten Albums for a Dollar” signup bonus for joining a record club. (At the time, I had never heard of Rush, never heard any of the songs, but I thought the cover art looked cool on the tiny stickers.)

After hearing the epic science fiction music of “2112,” “Xanadu,” and “Cygnus X-1,” I was hooked. I haunted record stores, picking up any Rush album I could find.
A Farewell to Kings
was followed by
Hemispheres,
then
Permanent Waves.

I went to my first Rush concert for the
Moving Pictures
tour in 1981, and I haven’t missed one since, in thirty years. The next album was
Signals
. And then
Grace Under Pressure.

Grace Under Pressure
hit me at exactly the right time as I was plotting my novel
Resurrection, Inc.
The music seemed to tie in exactly with the story taking shape in my mind. “We need someone to talk to, and someone to sweep the floors.” “Are we the last ones left alive?” “Suspicious-looking stranger flashes you a dangerous grin.” “Steely-eyed outside—to hide the enemy within.” “One humanoid escapee, one android on the run.” “Cruising in prime time, soaking up the cathode rays.”

As I wrote the novel, I had specific scenes in mind tied directly to the lyrics; Rush provided the soundtrack in my imagination. When Signet Books published the novel in 1988, I autographed copies to Neil and to his bandmates Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee, then mailed them off to the black hole (Cygnus X-1?) of Mercury Records.

A year later, Neil wrote back. We struck up a correspondence, and then during their
Presto
tour he bicycled down to my townhouse in the San Francisco area where we met for the first time. I’ve known Neil longer than I’ve known my wife Rebecca (and we’ve been married twenty years); in fact,
Roll the Bones
was the first rock concert Rebecca had ever attended (and not a bad way to start, with front-and-center seats and backstage passes).

When I was asked to contribute a story for the Pocket Books anthology
Shock Rock II
—rock-themed horror and dark-fantasy stories—working with Neil seemed a natural thing to do.

Neil himself has bicycled around Africa several times, and has written detailed and insightful travel journals. (You can check out his latest travelogues at neilpeart.net, and he also has a new collection of his essays and photos,
Far and Away: A Prize Every Time.)
Shortly before I received the
Shock Rock
anthology invitation, Neil had sent me a copy of his self-published book,
The African Drum
, detailing his adventures in Africa, including vivid descriptions of the landscape and people. It all seemed perfect fodder for a short story. The character in “Drumbeats” is loosely based on him, of course, and large portions of the narrative are taken from these travelogues.

While writing intelligent and meaningful lyrics to his songs, Neil always had aspirations of being a writer (and he has published several excellent nonfiction books). However, after “Drumbeats” appeared in print and he received his portion of the meager payment, Neil decided that he wouldn’t quit his job as a platinum-selling rock drummer and lyricist any time soon.

While I’m very proud of the story we wrote together, as a Rush fan, I’m glad of his decision as well.

DRUMBEATS

Kevin J. Anderson & Neil Peart

After nine months of touring across North America—with hotel suites and elaborate dinners and clean sheets every day—it felt good to be hot and dirty, muscles straining not for the benefit of any screaming audience, but just to get to the next village up the dusty road, where none of the natives recognized Danny Imbro or knew his name. To them, he was just another White Man, an exotic object of awe for little children, a target of scorn for drunken soldiers at border checkpoints.

Bicycling through Africa was about the furthest thing from a rock concert tour that Danny could imagine—which was why he did it, after promoting the latest Blitzkrieg album and performing each song until the tracks were worn smooth in his head. This cleared his mind, gave him a sense of balance, perspective.

The other members of Blitzkrieg did their own thing during the group’s break months. Phil, whom they called the “music machine” because he couldn’t stop writing music, spent his relaxation time cranking out film scores for Hollywood; Reggie caught up on his reading, soaking up grocery bags full of political thrillers and mysteries; Shane turned into a vegetable on Maui. But Danny Imbro took his expensive-but-battered bicycle and bummed around West Africa. The others thought it strangely appropriate that the band’s drummer would go off hunting for tribal rhythms.

Late in the afternoon on the sixth day of his ride through Cameroon, Danny stopped in a large open market and bus depot in the town of Garoua. The marketplace was a line of mud-brick kiosks and chophouses, the air filled with the smell of baked dust and stones, hot oil and frying beignets. Abandoned cars squatted by the roadside, stripped clean but unblemished by corrosion in the dry air. Groups of men and children in long blouses like nightshirts idled their time away on the street corners.

Wives and daughters appeared on the road with their buckets, going to fetch water from the well on the other side of the marketplace. They wore bright-colored
pagnes
and kerchiefs, covering their traditionally naked breasts with T-shirts or castoff Western blouses, since the government in the capital city of Yaounde had forbidden women from going topless.

Behind one kiosk in the shade sat a pan holding several bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta, and ginger ale, cooling in water. Some vendors sold a thin stew of bony fish chunks over gritty rice, others sold
fufu
, a dough-like paste of pounded yams to be dipped into a sauce of meat and okra. Bread merchants stacked their long
baguettes
like dry firewood.

Danny used the back of his hand to smear sweat-caked dust off his forehead, then removed the bandanna he wore under his helmet to keep the sweat out of his eyes. With streaks of white skin peeking through the layer of grit around his eyes, he probably looked like some strange lemur.

In halting French, he began haggling with a wiry boy to buy a bottle of water. Hiding behind his kiosk, the boy demanded 800 francs for the water, an outrageous price. While Danny attempted to bargain it down, he saw the gaunt, grayish-skinned man walking through the marketplace like a wind-up toy running down.

The man was playing a drum.

The boy cringed and looked away. Danny kept staring. The crowd seemed to shrink away from the strange man as he wandered among them, continuing his incessant beat. He wore his hair long and unruly, which in itself was unusual among the close-cropped Africans. In the equatorial heat, the long stained overcoat he wore must have heated his body like a furnace, but the man did not seem to notice. His eyes were focused on some invisible distance.

“
Huit-cent francs
,” the boy insisted on his price, holding the lukewarm bottle of water just out of Danny’s reach.

The staggering man walked closer, tapping a slow monotonous beat on the small cylindrical drum under his arm. He did not change his tempo, but continued to play as if his life depended on it. Danny saw that the man’s fingers and wrists were wrapped with scraps of hide; even so, he had beaten his fingertips bloody.

Danny stood transfixed. He had heard tribal musicians play all manner of percussion instruments, from hollowed tree trunks, to rusted metal cans, to beautifully carved
djembe
drums with goat-skin drumheads—but he had never heard a tone so rich and sweet, with such an odd echoey quality as this strange African drum.

In the studio, he had messed around with drum synthesizers and reverbs and the new technology designed to turn computer hackers into musicians. But this drum sounded different, solid and pure, and it hooked him through the heart, hypnotizing him. It distracted him entirely from the unpleasant appearance of its bearer.

“What is that?” he asked.

“
Sept-cent francs
,” the boy insisted in a nervous whisper, dropping his price to 700 and pushing the water closer.

Danny walked in front of the staggering man, smiling broadly enough to show the grit between his teeth, and listened to the tapping drumbeat. The drummer turned his gaze to Danny and stared through him. The pupils of his eyes were like two gaping bullet wounds through his skull. Danny took a step backward, but found himself moving to the beat. The drummer faced him, finding his audience. Danny tried to place the rhythm, to burn it into his mind—something this mesmerizing simply had to be included in a new Blitzkrieg song.

Danny looked at the cylindrical drum, trying to determine what might be causing its odd double-resonance—a thin inner membrane, perhaps? He saw nothing but elaborate carvings on the sweat polished wood, and a drumhead with a smooth, dark brown coloration. He knew the Africans used all kinds of skin for their drumheads, and he couldn’t begin to guess what this was.

He mimed a question to the drummer, then asked, “
Est-ce-que je peux l’essayer
?” May I try it?

The gaunt man said nothing, but held out the drum near enough for Danny to touch it without interrupting his obsessive rhythm. His overcoat flapped open, and the hot stench of decay made Danny stagger backward, but he held his ground, reaching for the drum.

Danny ran his fingers over the smooth drumskin, then tapped with his fingers. The deep sound resonated with a beat of its own, like a heartbeat. It delighted him. “For sale?
Est-ce-que c’est a vendre
?” He took out a thousand francs as a starting point, although if water alone cost 800 francs here, this drum was worth much, much more.

The man snatched the drum away and clutched it to his chest, shaking his head vigorously. His drumming hand continued its unrelenting beat.

Danny took out two thousand francs, then was disappointed to see not the slightest change of expression on the odd drummer’s face. “Okay, then, where was the drum made? Where can I get another one?
Où est-ce qu’on peut trouver un autre comme ça
?” He put most of the money back into his pack, keeping 200 francs out. Danny stuffed the money into the fist of the drummer; the man’s hand seemed to be made of petrified wood. “
Où
?”

The man scowled, then gestured behind him, toward the Mandara Mountains along Cameroon’s border with Nigeria. “
Kabas
.”

He turned and staggered away, still tapping on his drum as if to mark his footsteps. Danny watched him go, then returned to the kiosk, unfolding the map from his pack. “Where is this Kabas? Is it a place?
C’est un village
?”

“
Huit-cent francs
,” the boy said, offering the water again at his original 800 franc price.

Danny bought the water, and the boy gave him directions.

***

He spent the night in a Garouan hotel that made Motel 6 look like Caesar’s Palace. Anxious to be on his way to find his own new drum, Danny roused a local vendor and cajoled him into preparing a quick omelet for breakfast. He took a sip from his 800-franc bottle of water, saving the rest for the long bike ride, then pedaled off into the stirring sounds of early morning.

As Danny left Garoua on the main road, heading toward the mountains, savanna and thorn trees stretched away under a crystal sky. A pair of doves bathed in the dust of the road ahead, but as he rode toward them, they flew up into the last of the trees with a
chuk-chuk
of alarm and a flash of white tail feathers. Smoke from grassfires on the plains tainted the air.

How different it was to be riding through a landscape, he thought—with no walls or windows between his senses and the world—rather than just riding by it. Danny felt the road under his thin wheels, the sun, the wind on his body. It made a strange place less exotic, yet it became infinitely more real.

The road out of Garoua was a wide boulevard that turned into a smaller road heading north. With his bicycle tires humming and crunching on the irregular pavement, Danny passed a few ragged cotton fields, then entered the plains of dry, yellow grass and thorny scrub, everywhere studded with boulders and sculpted anthills. By 7:30 in the morning, a hot breeze rose, carrying a honeysuckle-like perfume. Everything vibrated with heat.

Within an hour the road grew worse, but Danny kept his pace, taking deep breaths in the trancelike state that kept the horizon moving closer. Drums. Kabas. Long rides helped him clear his head, but he found he had to concentrate to steer around the worst ruts and the biggest stones.

Great columns of stone appeared above the hills to east and west. One was pyramid-shaped, one a huge rounded breast, yet another a great stone phallus. Danny had seen photographs of these “inselberg” formations caused by volcanoes that had eroded over the eons, leaving behind vertical cores of lava.

Erosion had struck the road here, too, turning it into a heaving washboard, which then veered left into a trough between tumbled boulders and up through a gauntlet of thorn trees. Danny stopped for another drink of water, another glance at the map. The water boy at the kiosk had marked the location of Kabas with his fingernail, but it was not printed on the map.

After Danny had climbed uphill for an hour, the beaten path became no more than a worn trail, forcing him to squeeze between walls of thorns and dry millet stalks. The squadrons of hovering dragonflies were harmless, but the hordes of tiny flies circling his face were maddening, and he couldn’t pedal fast enough to escape them.

It was nearly noon, the sun reflecting straight up from the dry earth, and the little shade cast by the scattered trees dwindled to a small circle around the trunks. “Where the hell am I going?” he said to the sky.

But in his head he kept hearing the odd, potent beat resonating from the bizarre drum he had seen in the Garoua marketplace. He recalled the grayish, shambling man who had never once stopped tapping on his drum, even though his fingers bled. No matter how bad the road got, Danny thought, he would keep going. He’d never been so intrigued by a drumbeat before, and he never left things half finished.

Danny Imbro was a goal-oriented person. The other members of Blitzkrieg razzed him about it, that once he made up his mind to do something, he plowed ahead, defying all common sense. Back in school, he had made up his mind to be a drummer. He had hammered away at just about every object in sight with his fingertips, pencils, silverware, anything that made noise. He kept at it until he drove everyone else around him nuts, and somewhere along the line he became good.

Now people stood at the chain-link fences behind concert halls and applauded whenever he walked from the backstage dressing rooms out to the tour buses—as if he were somehow doing a better job of walking than any of them had ever seen before. . . .

Up ahead, an enormous buttress-tree, a gnarled and twisted pair of trunks hung with cable-thick vines, cast a wide patch of shade. Beneath the tree, watching him approach, sat a small boy.

The boy leaped to his feet, as if he had been waiting for Danny. Shirtless and dusty, he held a hooklike withered arm against his chest; but his grin was completely disarming. “
Je suis guide
?” the boy called.

Relief stifled Danny’s laugh. He nodded vigorously. “
Oui
!” Yes, he could certainly use a guide right about now. “
Je cherche Kabas—village des tambours
. The village of drums.”

The smiling boy danced around like a goat, jumping from rock to rock. He was pleasant-faced and healthy looking, except for the crippled arm; his skin was very dark but his eyes had a slight Asian cast. He chattered in a high voice, a mixture of French and native dialect. Danny caught enough to understand that the boy’s name was Anatole.

Before the boy led him on, though, Danny dismounted, leaning his bicycle against a boulder, and unzipped his pack to take out the raisins, peanuts, and the dry remains of a baguette. Anatole watched him with wide eyes, and Danny gave him a handful of raisins, which the boy wolfed down. Small flies whined around their faces as they ate. Danny answered the boy’s incessant questions with as few words as possible: did he come from America, did black boys live there, why was he visiting Cameroon?

The short rest sank its soporific claws into him, but Danny decided not to give in. An afternoon siesta made a lot of sense, but now that he had his own personal guide to the village, he made it his goal not to stop again until they reached Kabas. “Okay?” Danny raised his eyebrows and struggled to his feet.

Anatole sprang out from the shade and fetched Danny’s bike for him, struggling with one arm to keep it upright. After several trips to Africa, Danny had seen plenty of withered limbs, caused by childhood diseases, accidents, and bungled inoculations. Out here in the wilder areas, such problems were even more prevalent, and he wondered how Anatole managed to survive; acting as a “guide” for the rare travelers would hardly suffice.

Danny pulled out a hundred francs—an eighth of what he had paid for one bottle of water—and handed it to the boy, who looked as if he had just been handed the crown jewels. Danny figured he had probably made a friend for life.

Anatole trotted ahead, gesturing with his good arm. Danny pedaled after him.

***

The narrow valley captured a smear of greenness in the dry hills, with a cluster of mango trees, guava trees, and strange baobabs with eight-foot-thick trunks. Playing the knowledgeable tour guide, Anatole explained that the local women used the baobab fruits for baby formula if their breast milk failed. The villagers used another tree to manufacture an insect repellent.